


a day that's gray and lonely

by SecretReyloTrash (BadOldWest)



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1930s, Alternate Universe - Historical, An Unnecessary Perversion of a Beloved Classic Because I Am Gone From God’s Light, Billionaire Kylo Ren, Christmas, Crack, Crackfic with Unironic Porn, Daddy Kink, Extended Daddy Warbucks Joke, F/M, Fun Fact: Kylo Finding Rey is Also How Batman Picked One of His Robins, Hot Orphan Annie That Fucks, Merry Christmas Ya Filthy Reylos, New York City, Orphan Rey, Rey is of Legal Age, Smut, Snalps as Hannigan and Rooster, Snoke/Palpatine: Be Gay Do Crime, Sugar Daddy AU, Sugar Daddy Orphan Annie AU, This is Maybe the Campiest Snoke and Palpatine Forgive Me, WHAT IT’S A CHRISTMAS MOVIE, nonlinear timeline, very silly
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2020-01-23
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:54:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21843265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadOldWest/pseuds/SecretReyloTrash
Summary: Billionaire Kylo Rey typically spends Christmas alone, until he catches Rey on the streets stealing the tires off his car. Enchanted by the girl with no family of her own, he takes her in for the holiday, and is soon ready to give her anything her heart desires. Can he find the family that she's been waiting for? The Orphan Annie AU No One asked For And Several People Begged Me To Stop.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Sheev Palpatine/Snoke
Comments: 83
Kudos: 324





	1. come what may

**Author's Note:**

> I'm definitely destroying a beloved classic by filling it with smut and whatever qualifies for humor by my trash standards: but Rey is not underage. I still toy with a lot of the Daddy Kink dynamic, but she is over 18 and consenting. Merry Christmas!

There are little, unpleasant things she remembers about Christmas Eve: glittery tights were scratchy, tired eyes, church was boring. That was back when memories were distinct enough to be memories at all. Before the flat gray of the orphanage took all the little pinching of flashing color out. The waistband of the tights being too tight around her middle, shoes that didn’t fit, the pew of the church so unforgiving when her little legs hung down from her seat. Her face felt hot and flushed, it was all ruby and discomfort, and that was before things were gray and lonely. 

Before she was left behind.

And before she was found.

Rey twitches a finger under one of her stockings. Remembering the feeling as she digs a fingernail into her flesh. A phantom itch from an old memory. Her legs twinkle with golden stars woven into the black nylon, her feet encased in a copper-shiny pair of t-strap heels. 

It is ruby, like the old Christmases, all around her. The staff have done their best to please her, please _him_ by pleasing her, everything glitters. 

His fork yields in front of his lips as he stares at her. He is always looking at her so intently. It scares her, how much he wants her to enjoy everything, how he can't sit still until she can. 

“Is something wrong?”

Rey swallows guiltily. He doesn’t sound pleased, as grand a gesture as her first Christmas with him is, when she doesn’t seem pleased by the grand gesture.

The radio rises with a slow waft of Al Bowlly’s orchestra.

_Close your eyes_

_rest your head on my shoulder and sleep_

_Close your eyes_

_And I will close mine_

She fights to keep them open, even when he’s not the one singing those words, it feels like he is.

“Has anyone come forward since…” she notices the ambient station, not WFN-2187, which would probably be blaring an update as soon as it came as he so demanded, “since the radio announcement?”

Her voice is very small as she toys with her fork.

Kylo coughs, low and dry in his throat. She regrets asking immediately. It hurt her asking it. But nothing like the pain that flashes across his face. 

As though he hadn't done _everything_ to help her and she still asks like he carelessly hadn't even bothered to inform her that something had changed.

 _He has everything,_ she tries to remind herself. Even if he’s used all of it to be kind to her. He can face a disappointment if she’s already had so many in her young life.

It just kills her, the familiarity of his feelings of not being enough. She knows that feeling well. Rejected. Abandoned.

Which is why she has to keep asking this question.

Rey stretches out her legs. Nylons feel better than her Sunday Mass tights from long ago; even when they still glitter the same way. There’s a slight emerald shimmer to them, piney, like the tree across the room strung with tinsel. And then the pool of velvet in her lap, liquid and sensual so she can’t keep her hands off of it, his lips quirking up at her in a proud smirk whenever he catches her lovingly touching her dress. 

All these pretty things. There has been nothing he has given her that wasn't beautiful. 

He’s been very good to his little girl.

“Not yet,” he answers, a low gravel to his tone, “I’ll let you know the instant we hear any information.”

“I know that,” she tries to comfort him with the assurance, but he’s staring deeply at her. 

Not believing her. 

“Do you, Rey?”

Something’s missing.

Her mouth is dry. 

“Yes, Daddy.”

* * *

Snoke watches the early snowfall with a marked distrust, spreading virgin and white over the sidewalk and the deli across the street and adding an angelic glow to all the city lights. He can only take his sleep in the richest of black darkness: a luxuriant soul, and an unyielding one. 

He secures his long gold housecoat around his waist with a theatrical twirl of the belt.

He doesn’t even look when Sheev enters his office. He knows the sound of his step over whatever else would disturb him this time of night. Probably a crying child. He’s sure it’s a request for money, again. Snoke doesn’t have money these days, same as everyone else, but he has what nobody else does: the illusion of money. 

He doesn’t powder his cheeks each morning to look _poor._

The same cheek where Sheev presses a slow kiss, the gramophone rocking out a slow romantic tune, and Snoke is so happy to be caught in a moment of his own illusion he almost falls for Sheev Palpatine’s sweet talk. 

Again.

“What do you want?”

He can see it in Palpatine's shifty eyes. His hat isn't even off and he's hatching a plan. Snoke should know better by now than be seduced again, but it's too late for him. He always at least has to listen before he turns him away. Though even after he's done listening, he rarely ever does.

“To tell you about a Christmas miracle. There’s been a call made out,” Sheev’s sleeves puff out of tight wrists as he adjusts his cufflinks, “our boy Kylo Ren has taken in a lost lamb. The kid’s got him so pussy-whipped that he’s out searching for her whole family, who’ll he’ll no doubt fully support once he finds them.”

“What’s that got to do with us?”

“Plutt says it’s one of _ours.”_

Snoke scratches under his eye. “I don’t think one of our brats would be sending us a Christmas card even if a millionaire fucked her silly and gave her all the money in the world.”

 _“Billionaire,”_ Sheev reaches out and rubs his shoulders excitedly, Snoke can't help but find himself relaxing into it, “and she’s from Plutt’s home, I don’t think she’s ever seen our faces. He’s got no money from the family, so she’s one of our few _genuine charities.”_

The practice of giving up a child was half fairy tale, half tragedy. These poor orphans usually thought their mommies and daddies had taken an elevator trip up to heaven: but since the Crash that was hardly the case. It was so pathetic, the hope of a child, that they either fully believed one of two things that were equally untrue. Either their parents had all died in complete freak accidents stranding them completely isolated with no family left, or their parents were definitely coming back someday. It was hard to turn a profit out of housing orphans, even with the city helping out.

Children were expensive. 

But those parents who weren’t coming back sometimes left a small sum to go towards the care of the child.

Little did they know how many of them pooled those funds together to actually pay for Snoke’s gold lamé housecoat. He even had one dumb broad send monthly letters for her little kid, but Snoke pocketed whatever pennies were in them and dumped the envelope in the fire.

He never much cared for children, actually.

But the actual charities, the brats whose parents couldn’t cough up a penny before Snoke took them into one of his orphanages, those also sickened him into a filthy dark grudge. Even without ever having met her, he fumed at her existence. That child did owe him for her food and bed; even is she was all grown up and shacked up with a rich man. Especially since then. A return on his investment.

He glances down at the fraying sleeve of his trusty housecoat. He deserves better than this. He deserves _everything._ Not the flickering facade of fake gold around his thin body. Not Sheev coming back again and again with another quest for money and power. The snow on the ground beat silent down from the sky. Snoke was tired of this dump building and the pipes that froze. He was going to get the girl, get the money, and then go somewhere warm where he could have everything his heart desired.

Maybe Sheev could come too.

The good news for them both in this scheme is that Snoke is a master of illusions. They only have to last long enough for him to strike. 

They just had to prey on her vulnerabilities, dispose of her, and then they were free.


	2. instead of kisses we get kicked

Her feet drag on her first walk down the hallway of a mansion bigger than anything she’d ever seen. It was like being  _ inside _ a city. The rooms were the shops and houses. The halls wide, well-lit alleys. Even the dark interior of the house was like navigating New York in the winter: hard and sharp and sleek.

“I won’t ask for much from you during your time here.”

It’s odd to see his broad-shouldered suit briskly moving away from her. He’s walking assuredly, like he knows she’ll just struggle to keep up. 

He’s an oddball: but she’s got a wrench in her coverall pocket that can break a nose, just as it can repair an engine, if she taps it just the right way against the bone. If she does that it’ll sputter with blood just a jalopy will sputter with smoke. 

She worries it in her hand as she watches him move through his house. His indoor city.

But she’s oddly not afraid.

“You will have full access to the house and all its facilities. The staff is instructed to cater to your every whim. _You are my guest._ Your schedule is only dictated by two occupations. You’ll eat when I eat. You’ll sleep when I sleep,” he pauses at the edge of the door he just pulled open, “with me. In my bedroom.”

Kylo Ren, the millionaire,  _ the billionaire, _ peers over his shoulder back at her in question. She’s seen nothing but servants before now. By this late hour, she had previously assumed she’d never see him. 

He clears his throat, as though this is the proposition, not  _ the rules, _ as he had been previously outlining.

Rey nods. 

“And ask and you shall receive,” he stares at her intently, “anything you ask for. Anything.”

“My dog,” and she shoves her hands in her pockets.

He raises his eyebrows at her request.

“Where is your dog?”

She shrugs.

“Back where I live.”

He waits for more information. She doesn’t give it.

“The street?”

_ “A _ street.”

He sighs. Realizes she may not have more of an answer to give.

“Let’s get back in the car, then.”

* * *

He couldn’t have loved her from the moment he saw her. Not that soon. But only hours into her stay he hasn’t figured out where that started. 

Her massive dog, Chewie, with his head in her lap. The way she absently chewed her nails. Her thin face, lovely body, clever hands.

He first sees her with a tire across her back, his tire, the tire she had stolen off his car, making quick work of another with her gloved hands. The cold doesn’t slow her one bit. He’d only been in the bank for a moment, sparing and unnecessary small talk, his driver not even finished with the cigarette he had been sneaking, by the time she almost has half the tires off the automobile.

He does not react like a man in love, but Kylo Ren, the billionaire, is not known for that kind of benevolence. 

He does respond on the impression that she is a thief. 

He shoves the girl onto her back on the backseat and instead tells the chauffeur to fix the damages and then  _ drive. _

He has of course immediately wrestled her into the car without actually meaning her any harm, he is merely impulsively overcome. 

And he just wants to talk.

The girl has soot streaked over one cheek. She’s clumsily dressed, like she wandered into a coatroom at a hotel and stolen whatever she could get her hands on. Her green muffler makes her flashing eyes pop. 

He tries not to let it affect him.

She seems less convinced of his intentions to not harm her, even when they pull over, but shoves her hands into the pockets of her men’s coat and follows him inside the restaurant anyway.

It is not a pleasant interview in the tearoom he sometimes took a modest breakfast by himself, coaxing her to talk to him with toast, that he learns small pieces of her sad tale. 

“Where did you grow up?”

She chews at him with a distrusting, sideways gaze. Even though he's promised he will not press charges and just wants her fed, it's like domesticating a feral.

Start slow. Gentle tones, low voices. With food.

“Nowhere. I aged out of an orphanage and since then I’ve been out on the streets. On my own.”

He sighs and sets the newspaper he had been skimming -he likes to do multiple tasks at once- on the empty seat beside him.

“You can’t imagine I would, in good conscience, send you back on your way.”

“Prison has three square meals,” she barely looks up at him, while she stabbed a stick of bread into a runny soft-boiled egg yolk, “living between two places isn’t the worst thing in the world.”

To him it sounds like a familiar agony.

“Or,” he can’t believe he was saying this, in the middle of a crowded tearoom where he is already getting looks from the waitresses because he was a public figure who always dined alone, “you could join me for Christmas. As my guest.”

She stares at him, mouth full of food, frozen in shock. He already knows he can't lose her. He can't bear to.

Meeting Rey is an accident: but everything else he does is with complete and perfect intention. 

* * *

The dog sleeps between them.

“He gets cold,” Rey slips under the sheets without so much as a glance at her host. 

This is a bit more strange than she’d considered it when she shrugged at the request this afternoon. To be safe, she’d stashed the wrench under the pillow when he was in the bathroom. 

He looks very handsome in his pajamas: crisp dark green against his pale skin. They’re as formal looking as the suit he wore this afternoon, and surprisingly festive for such a grim man. She has a brief realization of the fact that he might actually care about Christmas, going so far as finding someone to share with with.

He isn’t even looking at her. Just slithered under the covers and nodding at the dog, who looks twenty pounds lighter and fives shades brighter after the bath he’d received this afternoon.

Rey wonders how  _ she  _ looked. After all the care she’d gotten today. Is she shiny, and pretty, like Chewie? 

Did  _ he _ know she’d be, under all the grime? 

Only the slight lingering numb to her toes is any sign that this morning had been real. Some angry-looking suit shoving her onto her back into his car and ordering his driver to go once the wheels had been put back together. She lay on the seat of the swanky vehicle while he lounged with her feet in his lap, trying to formulate and escape. But the car was so  _ warm _ on the inside. 

She should have tried to land a good kick on him inside the car: but he was probably already turning her in for the tires and in prison apparently you get three square meals, so she was debating for most of the drive if she should fight this. She had been caught red-handed.

Chewie snuggles up to her side with a curious, wet nose. His nose had gone so dry when it had gotten cold. It’s a relief to see her friend feeling better. She was getting worried. 

She pets his fur absently, relaxing more than she means to even with the massive body on the other side of her. It’s an unusual request, but he didn’t need to take her to a bed to do whatever he had planned on  _ if _ he was going to. Even now his face is restful, even facing her on the pillow like she wasn’t planning on driving a wrench against his nose if he so much as touched her wrong.

“Kylo Ren.”

He doesn’t open his eyes.

“Yes.”

“You take in a lot of strays, Mr. Ren?”

“Never in my life. Just you.”

The dog sneezes.

_ “You too,” _ Rey scratches his head comfortingly. Chewie always liked to be included.

Kylo Ren lies there like he’s too uncomfortable to move. She’d be nervous by the tension of it, except it seems like he’s trying to be  _ polite _ with her. Not wanting to jar her while she’s falling asleep. Kids at the orphanage had to crowd into shared beds, and they never tried to keep from jostling her. Rey has slept with so many elbows in her ribs she feels like she has the room to herself with him.

Oddball.

“Why,” she rolls towards him, “in this whole house, do you only have the two of us sleep here?”

He is completely still next to her: if the silence wasn’t so awkward she’d believe herself to be completely alone. 

After a few minutes, his distant thunder-soft voice breaks the din. 

“It gets...lonely, in this big house.”

“Huh.”

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “For asking.”

“Don’t be,” she settles into the bed calmly, “kind of nice to have someone there to make sure you don’t freeze to death.”

“I would never,” his soft voice is the last thing she hears before she falls asleep, “I would never let that happen to you, Rey.”


	3. I think I'm gonna like it here

He is half convinced she picked him for a safe place to keep that dog out of the cold, from the way she struts about too good to speak to him. She has full run of the staff and is terrible at using them. He has made firm orders that they ask her yes-or-no questions or else she’d never ask to eat, sleep, or bathe. She’ll take the offers made to her: but the have a request answered or to even actively make one if a foreign language to the skinny thing.

And that won’t do at all. When he woke up their first morning together with the dog somehow tangled at their feet, and her curled up in his arms, all she did was yawn, cuddle closer, and ask if they could sleep in. He felt like a titan.

He was resigned to have her spoiled rotten.

The street has left something of a mark on her, though Rey won’t talk about it. He can tell though, that she’s in half awe, half resentment in the mansion she will spend the next few weeks until the holiday. She wanders it with narrowed but searching eyes, that mangy dog at her side, absently scratching his fur. 

While he works in his office, Kylo can’t tap down the subtle smile that twists across his face when he hears the dog’s nails click on the marble floor, signaling Rey growing close.

She almost strangles him when he shows her the indoor swimming pool in the house: hoping to impress her. Out of principle, it seems, though the attack feels nothing but unprovoked when she shoves him into the shallow end with a yowl. 

She jumps in after him and they swim for the afternoon in their clothes. He can’t say he’s enjoyed a single luxury of this house until her. Now he wants to share everything with her.

He’s satisfied merely to have her here: safe in the house. The cold can’t get her, a bloom forms on her cheeks for the food is better than she must get from the money stealing car parts on the street, and she doesn’t reject spoiling. She lets clothes be put on her, allows herself to be escorted to a private theater for movie screenings downtown, eats what’s put in front of her. She is pliant enough not to fight: though there is a silence about it that implies indifference of the present or at least intense schematic planning towards the future.

It’s clear she doesn’t fully trust it.

Rey is a mystery to him, but no matter, he can provide perfect patience in opening her up. He’s just happy she’s here.

She is being so accommodating already, keeping quiet and still during the movie he took her to see, and he wants to keel over at her feet when she touches his arm while he laughs during one movie scene.

He doesn’t mean to fuss over her. That makes him sound overbearing. He likes her playful freedom throughout the house. He likes her snoring. He likes her carefree laugh. He likes his own, foreign to his own ears, whenever he’s near her.

It happens by accident.

“I’m not a child,” she growls at him when he dots a napkin where a blob of jelly -her requested, very messy lunch- on her knee. There’s no malice in her tone. Only liveliness.

A gun moll over some grape jelly.

He flushes, having hoped to be chivalrous and now caught kneeling at her feet with a napkin like a silly old nurse. 

He sits back in his office chair abruptly. She watches his reaction with careful eyes, seated on his desk so they can eat lunch together. She ignored the chair he offered, opted for the high ground. He’d usually insist they go to a dining room table, but it was something she gave back to him -small, divine pleasure it was- that she didn’t want to keep him from his work and instead kept him company in his office. 

Frankly he has felt swamped lately and it did help to keep to his task with a little companionship. 

Her hospitality is better than his.

She threads her hands in his hair. Holding his gaze.

She looks fresh as a daisy: expensive soap, hair bobbed and curled like Clara Bow, mascara in her long lashes and a doll face under the waves. She looks like a vision in her velvet dress, one of hundreds for maybe a dozen days as his holiday guest. 

_ There's always New Year's...and Valentine's. _

He swallows as she leans down towards him.

“I’m...not…” she tilts her head one way, then another. He breathes unsteadily as she eyes him, “a little girl. Your little girl.”

He can only push the air from his lungs, in and out, through his nose.

She shakes her head sadly.

“Unless...you want…?”

“I want,” he’s not sure what he’s agreeing to, just that he wants anything that has to do with her,  _ “I want.” _

She narrows her eyes at him, wiggling her bent knee. 

“Then get it out.”

It takes him a moment to realize what she means, and then he’s yanked the cloth napkin off the silver serving tray on his desk, and is hunched over dutifully dabbing at the jelly stain on her stockings.

“Lick it.”

He does, first the napkin, but then she repeats herself.

His hand curls around the back of her knee. Her skirt rides up.

He laps at her stockings, moaning at the sugary taste of grape jelly and the swipe of the soft material running under his tongue. Greedily, he suctions his mouth to the shadow of the stain and sucks the nylon into his mouth.

Getting a heady hit of her skin underneath.

He moans. Draws her foot into his lap so he can better work his mouth over her skin. His chair wheels his body between her legs, scooted by heavy, frantic feet.

She picks up her toast as he does this and eats over his bent head, crunching happily as she chews like nothing has happened.

She whimpers softly when his teeth dig into the supple flesh above her knee. One cry makes his entire body shake.

He has to pull away.

He sits back, breathless, not even sure if he’s remedied the spot. He has ripped a hole in her stockings with his mouth. He turns bright red and offers stuttered apologies.

She glances down and digs her thumb in the hole. A small smile graces her lips.

“You got it out,” she says dryly, staring first down at her outstretched knee and then his flushed face.

He licks his lips and nods. His mouth feels completely dry.

Rey blushes herself and bows over his seat to kiss his cheek.

“Thanks, Daddy.”


	4. betcha that life is gonna be swell

He had been working on getting her to ask for what she truly wanted. 

And had been too impatient for Christmas to come. He is spoiling her rotten already. Shoes, clothes, jewelry, even toys piled up at her feet.

Rey models what she can for him, with no real opinion one way or the other, which just makes his purchases clamber for more accuracy. She doesn’t ask for a single thing, it was that maddening series of yes-and-no where he had to offer everything and she’d somewhat indifferently select from those options. 

He doesn’t know what she wants. 

Just that one night, getting tired of waiting for him to join her in bed, Rey pads into his office in her pretty silk nightgown and sits down on his desk to kiss him, pleading her way to his undivided attention with just her lips.

She didn’t have to ask what he wanted. She hits the mark, and gives it to him, and enough to always want more.

Her kiss. Her legs dangling down into his lap. Her body cuddled into his in bed, sighing when he brushes closer, a little whine sometimes pleading.

“Sleep, baby.”

He knows what he wants. She knows it too.

But they have to be clear what she wants as well.

His perfect girl.

* * *

Sometimes he wants her to be bad.

“Oh Daddy, no Daddy  _ no--” _

It’s all for show, though, because she’d use his real name to leverage out of anything she didn’t want: by calling him her special name for him at all, she is engaging in this just as much by struggling and whining as he pins her to his lap. 

They’ve been practicing this. She tossed a necklace he gave her into the pond at central park this afternoon, after he took her ice skating. He was never deft on skates, but she was hopeless, and having her cling to his hands while he guided her over the ice was the strongest he’d ever felt. 

Then she decided to be bad, teasing him on the walk home, causing trouble. He didn’t mind. Up until she did something so outrageously deliberate to warrant punishment, chucking the diamonds into the icy water as they stopped on a footpath, did he even dream of holding a single thing against her.

Her curls bounce around her ears as he fights her on the bed, drawing her down flush to his bare thighs, her ass nestled in his shoved-down pants.

She’s so tight, hiccuping with dramatic tears as he slowly fills her all the way up.

_ When I scream, _ she told him one night, quietly in bed,  _ you won’t hate me. When I rage at you, you forgive me. It’s not that I feel these ways towards you, it’s that you let me. It’s that I’m safe. _

And that’s when she started to share herself and the vague sense of what she wanted.

“Patience baby girl,” he purrs richly, “sit  _ nicely _ on my lap.”

She coos softly in his shoulder, satisfied for a moment of perfect, snowy silence when he is stuffed all the way inside and no one moves. Deep and thick, a murmur of his own satisfaction answering darkly back to her. It is so, so nice to feel close to him, when he’s so big and holds her steady like this. When he fills her. When he gives her what she needs. 

He lets out a breath when he’s completely seated inside her. A relief. She feels the tension leave his body in a sigh like a ghost leaves a body. Her nails dig into his arms through his crisp tuxedo jacket. Needing him. Trying to smother her needs for a moment to let them both appreciate his perfect sense of peace. 

Even in the hidden depths of her greediness; she wants this to be what he needs too.

Still, the instincts of the body don’t account much for good intentions. And sitting still only reminds her of her inflamed, recently spanked backside. She can’t help a little hitch forward, a rock back. His lap is practically a playground, and he’s greatly encouraged her free reign of it. So she’s spoiled. If this is anyone’s fault, it’s his.

“Squirming when I asked you to sit nicely,” he groans in her ear, and she goes perfectly still out of fear until she hears his bored amusement with her, “are you really ready for me to hear what you want for Christmas? Good little girls get whatever they want, however, bad little girls…”

“Get a big lump of coal,” she mumbles, eyes half-lidded, rocking indignantly now on his cock, “Well I never got  _ anything, _ much less a--”

She gasps as he takes hold of her hips and jerks her up and down fast, a slick slide, “A. Nice. Big. Lump.” he hisses hotly in her ear, and she blushes from her curls to the tips of her toes. 

She loves this. Being bounced like she weighs nothing. His care and control. His safety.

“D-daddy,” she whimpers, the promise of coal, of  _ heat, _ somehow breaking her heart when it used to be more than her lonely heart could ever expect.

“Not this year,” he promises in a low voice, tickling her ear, “not my good girl. Whatever your heart desires Rey, anything. I will give you anything you ask for.”

Her tongue feels numb from biting down on it when she finally knits her eyes shut and stammers:

“My f-family, Daddy.”


	5. that something is no one but you

The clock strikes midnight on Christmas Eve, but they haven’t gone to bed yet.

Not after the call that came into his office.

Rey fidgets at her seat at the dining room table. He’d brought them there in haste to celebrate the news, waking the staff to bring out a cake meant for dessert the next day. This was good news.

Wasn’t it?

“Are you unhappy, Rey?”

She stops squirming to look guiltily up at him from her uneaten cake.

“No, I’m just...uncomfortable.”

He raises his eyebrows in concern, but she gestures to her tights.

“They’re getting itchy.”

He clicks his tongue like that is unacceptable for his little girl.

“You should take them off.”

Rey heaves a little breath, unsure to follow the instructions. It feels strange taking orders from him...knowing she’s...not his anymore.

Now that her family has telephoned to tell them that they’re alive. And they’re coming back for her.

_ “Rey,” he had said gently in his office, her ear crowded to the phone, “I don’t think this is real.” _

_ “Quiet,” she growled, like a hungry dog, and her timid lover flinched away as she pressed her ear desperately to the receiver.  _

After a moment’s hesitation, she stands up from the table and lifts her skirt. Her fingers dig into the waistband of the sparkly tights and slide them down her hips. 

It feels less like Christmas with them off.

He clears his throat.

“This is no way to celebrate,” he stand grandly, adjusting the jacket of his tuxedo to approach her in a gentlemanly manner.

Rey vibrates on a thread of fear:  _ please don’t touch me. I will fall apart if I have to be yours now. I have wanted this for too long to be conflicted about it now. _

But he merely holds out a hand to her.

“Dance with me.”

The music on the radio starts playing, started up again by one of the staff that seem to read his mind for him.

Rey pushes her tights down her legs and takes them off along with her shoes. He has both of her hands before she can put them back on.

He pulls her until she’s too close, until the tips of his shoes nearly pinch her bare toes, but with a sure tug she realizes he means to place her feet on top of his. 

He dances them both slowly around the tree. 

Rey sighs and presses her tired brow to his chest. He really was a perfect Daddy while it lasted. But she had a family again.

No matter how much it felt like he was her family last.

“Rey,” he lowers his lips to caress her ear, turning them skillfully around the room, “I have some doubts.”

Rey’s eyes flickered up at his; glittery with tears, glittery like tinsel, glittery like her tights. 

“Don’t say it.”

He clears his throat, pain lancing open and honest across his face.

“No, Rey. I haven’t been telling you everything.”

She whimpers and tries to break free from his grasp, but she can’t. He’s holding her much too tight.

“I have looked for your family. Really. I’ve looked everywhere. I thought I had...found them.”

_ “No,” _ she growls, muscles locking against his tender arms. 

If she can’t be free from his tight embrace she can still resist him.

“Rey,” it hurts him to tell her, “you're not a Palpatine. You're no one. They’re just after the reward money.”

“Stop it. You don’t know anything.”

“Your real parents died out in the snow not long after you were put in the orphanage. They were drunks who gave you up instead of the drink.”

These were strong accusations in prohibition: even if they’d had champagne with dinner, because a man like him could. 

Rey shoves herself away from him. Breaking that hold took a force in her she didn’t know she had.

He immediately pulls back from the cruel truth, desperate to please her:

“If it makes you happy Rey,” he chokes out, “if you want to go with them when they arrive tomorrow, if you want to go at all, you’re free to even if it isn’t with your parents. With the reward money. It’s yours. Anything you ask for is yours.”

“Don’t be kind,” she whines, something frantic choking her deep in her throat, “please don’t be kind to me now.”

“It’s yours,” he insists, his black hair falling over his eye as he holds out his hand to her. “I was meant to find you. I want you to know you’re  _ my _ family.”

She can’t take it.

“No,” it’s too much. Rey creeps back from his offer, “my family is coming back for me. You’re not my family.”


End file.
